National Black Arts Festival Set for Atlanta

Artist Sandra Rowe of Riverside, whose first solo show at a museum opened last month in Los Angeles, arrived here Thursday to take part in another first, the National Black Arts Festival.

“I think the caliber of the music and dance portions of the festival are superb,” Rowe said, “but it’s the visual arts I’m most excited about seeing--the work of Elizabeth Catlett and Faith Ringgold. That’s a lot of high-powered black art in one place.”

Rowe, whose solo exhibition continues at Los Angeles’ California Afro-American Museum, will be showing two of her artworks at the multimedia 9-day event beginning here Saturday.

Organizers, who plan to make it a biennial affair, say that about 1,100 artists (15 from Los Angeles) will participate in about 105 events at assorted Atlanta locales. All but 13 of the visual, literary and folk arts, theater, dance, music and film events are free.

“We’re trying to build a signature special event for Atlanta that’s as well known as the Spoleto Festival,” said the festival’s executive director, A. Michelle Smith in an interview here. The Spoleto Festival is an annual cultural celebration held in Charleston, S.C.

Highlighting black arts achievements from the 1920s Harlem Renaissance to present-day rising stars, the festival will include works by pivotal Harlem Renaissance artists, a tribute to modern dance pioneer Katherine Dunham by members of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, and the world premiere of “Sally,” a play about Civil War blacks by Pulitzer Prize-winner Charles Fuller to be performed by the Negro Ensemble Company.

Other performances scheduled are the 60- and 70-year-old tap dancing Copasetics, a “Blues and Barbeque Bust” on Auburn Avenue, the birthplace of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and early films of Spike Lee (“She’s Gotta Have It”).

The festival will also co-present two days of the annual Atlanta Jazz Festival, headlined by Ellis Marsalis and Lester Bowie.

“The festival is important because there has been an enormous body of magnificent work produced over the years by black artists and almost nobody knows about it,” said Smith, a Harvard graduate in administration who was a consultant in 1985 for Indiana’s 3-day 15th Annual Black Expo.

Atlanta’s festival is designed to show contributions by such individuals as Dunham, Harlem Renaissance artist Palmer Hayden and the Copasetics, Smith said, and to “create greater national exposure for artists working now--so you don’t have to be dead and gone before somebody knows you’ve made a major contribution.”

Art historian David Driskell said the event can help eradicate misconceptions about black arts.

“I think it will showcase a number of art forms not normally associated with the black community,” Driskell said, “such as many modern dance forms, abstract forms in the visual arts and avant garde theater.”

That notion guided Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins, a California Afro-American Museum curator who helped select works for the “National Artists Exhibition” in which Rowe’s pieces appear. (Though the festival officially ends Aug. 7, this art exhibit and many others will continue through late August.)

“We were looking first for high-quality pieces, but also working to stretch the boundaries of what is generally viewed of as Afro-American art,” LeFalle-Collins said of the exhibit that includes expressionistic paintings, abstract sculpture and video works by 45 contemporary artists.

Organizers say the festival in part is designed to show how black artists are part of the American cultural melting pot.

“I believe that the strength of American society and culture is that we respect the distinct nature of ethnic backgrounds of all Americans,” said Michael Lomax, chairman of the Fulton County Commission, one of the festival’s sponsors.

“This is an opportunity to present black artists in a racially homogenous environment. I don’t think that’s ghettoizing; I think that’s focusing.”

Lomax, who was raised in West Los Angeles, led the arts council of Fulton County (which includes Atlanta) in 1985 to study the viability of a black festival. After an “overwhelmingly positive response” to the idea, plans for the festival progressed, said executive director Smith, who was hired two years ago.

Sixty percent of festival participants come from across the country, the rest from Georgia. The 15 artists from Los Angeles include five who will lecture on theater or film plus 10 visual artists.

Twenty-five corporations, including McDonald’s and AT&T;, have contributed to the festival’s $1.5-million budget, as did the National Endowment for the Arts (with $100,000) and the city of Atlanta.

Smith expects up to 200,000 people to attend the festival.

“The standard is that most festivals have to operate in the red for three years,” she said. “My hope is that this one will be such a resounding success, we’ll have established ourselves in a year.”